To Biden or not to Biden 7/10/2024

                                               To Biden or not to Biden

We must demand Biden undergo a rigorous physical and cognitive test to assume the duties of President of the U.S. This should also apply to former President Trump, Supreme Court Justices, and members of Congress over 75. Biden’s legacy is already sullied by the blood of innocent Palestinians, and the killing is still going on. Killing and starving Palestinians is not defense of Israel but mass murder and genocide. America has long lost its moral compass.
We have gone from Howard Baker’s famous question about Richard Nixon — “What did the president know and when did he know it?” — to something much more pathetic: What does the president know, and does he even remember it? All this would be more sympathy-inducing if the president and his advisers weren’t engaged in what, to all outward appearances, looks to be an aggressive cover-up about the speed and extent of his decline. A phalanx of administration officials constantly insists that the president is sharp, spry, on top of it, slowed by age but well-oiled with wisdom. The president himself declared, “my memory is fine,” in an angry rebuttal in February to the report of Robert Hur, the special counsel, which described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” But the clearer it becomes that Hur was right, the more offensive the denials feel — not only because they are so transparently untrue but also because they seem so obviously self-interested. If, as Axios reported, the president is “dependably engaged” between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., then who are the Edith Wilsons running the country the other 18 hours of the day?
This is worse than reckless. We still elect a president, not a cabinet, and the president alone holds the vast constitutional powers of war, peace, justice, and administration. If the president’s secretaries, confidantes, and family members think they are helping him or the country by assuming an ever-increasing share of his decision-making, they aren’t. They are usurping his authority, deceiving the nation, and enticing our enemies into mischief or miscalculation. They are also feeding the rampant cynicism that in turn feeds MAGA nation. The embarrassment of Biden’s debate performance last month isn’t simply that it confirmed everything that Fox News gleefully alleged and MSNBC pompously denied about the president’s mental state. It’s that it perfectly fit the narrative of a deep state that protects its own, that calls its critics liars while lying all the time, that can barely hold it together but maintains a very high opinion of itself.
“Not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world,” Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in an interview last week. He made this grandiose — one might say Trumpian — claim in nearly the same breath as he flatly refused to take a simple cognitive test. No, it’s incumbent on those around him and, most of all, the Democratic Party, to force him to accept reality as it is, not as he wants it to be: he can’t win. He’s not fit to be president now, let alone in four years. The Democratic Party gave us this situation. Senior Democrats gaslit millions of voters to believe Biden was as “sharp as a tack” for over a year. The stories of his cognitive decline were “conspiracy theories.” It’s the biggest betrayal of trust I can think of, and if he is the nominee, Democrats are no different than Republicans: a hollow shell of a “party” to be filled with the whims of their leader. This great country deserves better.